Profile: Ed Boyes, co-founder Hello Fresh

Ed Boyes, co-founder of Hello Fresh, explains how his ecommerce business became worthy of a reported $10m investment in just 12 months and how he plans to expand as a result.

There are more cookery shows on TV than you can shake a hand blender at and we have made super-celebrities out of our top chefs. Yet according to the figures, we still aren’t cooking from scratch at home as much as other nations.

Hello Fresh is a company poised to take advantage of this. Launched at the beginning of last year and with a reported $10m investment under its belt, the company has had an impressive first year. I caught up with co-founder and marketing director Ed Boyes to find out more.

So Ed how did it all begin?

Patrick Drake is our head chef and he started the business. He and I had both been working in City jobs – Patrick at Goldman Sachs and me at Booz and Company in management consultancy. Patrick eventually quit his job to become a head chef. He had actually been secretly working in the restaurant at Goldman Sachs and decided he wanted to pursue his love of cooking.

He did some training at The Fat Duck and then created a YouTube channel of himself cooking. He became interested in making cooking easier and more accessible to people who feel intimidated by it. There has been a huge rise in interest in cooking but still a decline in people cooking at home.

Meanwhile I had previously set up an online business before I wen to Oxford and I missed the fun and satisfaction of running a company and being responsible for everything involved.

We looked across the ecommerce landscape at consumer facing industries and saw that most industries had been completely turned upside down by the internet – food looked like the last bastion. There are obvious challenges when it comes to food such as the perishability.

So where did the idea for Hello Fresh spring from?

We were introduced by friends to a model that was working really well in Sweden which send people recipes and ingredients to cook at home. Within three years that company had reached 2% of household penetration in Sweden which is amazing. Obviously Sweden has a slightly different cooking culture with more people eating as a family but we thought it was something that could be created here.

We have an advanced online grocery market here verses our global peers with companies like Ocado and Sainsbury’s but there are still many people that don’t grocery shop online. We didn’t think there was enough of a reason as a consumer to go online.

You still have to go around the site and chose what you want which is time consuming. You have to do all of the thinking yourself and there is little to inspire you. It can be a daunting experience and you end up getting the same old tried and tested ingredients. We want to challenge this process.

So when did you launch?

We launched at the beginning of 2012 just in London. We were packing the boxes up in Patrick’s living room sending them to family and friends to begin with them is grew organically through word of mouth.

We expanded nationally five months later. The logistics made it possible to deliver within 24 hours and we started using innovative wool packing bag – made of recycled sheep’s wool – which act like insulation and keep everything fresh. Once we went national the growth accelerated and we’ve sold over 100,000 boxes and now have ten full-time members of staff in our offices.

How do you intend to keep growing?

The next challenge is to make it more widely available and enter the mass market. We are planning to introduce an element of choice. At the moment you get three recipes which we pick for you. We recognise that while we want to introduce people to new ingredients, some people just don’t like certain things or have dietary requirements. We want to give people the option to swap a recipe for something else like an old favourite. We hope that will help us reach a bigger market.

Also, we have just finished our first TV advert which is due to go live at the beginning of March. It’s not an easy job trying to tell people about a new brand and a new concept at the same time. Particularly a concept that has a few different dimensions – its hard to represent it with one image. We think TV will prove a powerful medium in getting out message out there.

We have just extended our delivery from only on Tuesdays to Thursdays also which allows us to do more. We use third party couriers to make sure the goods get out – it is more scalable for us that way.

Did your previous experience online help you in setting up the website?

I first launched an ecommerce site six years ago – it was a sock delivery service which worked on subscription. There were many barriers to ordering online at the time. Things have definitely changed for the better – we have much more advanced analytics and shopping cart platforms, database management tools, email templates etc.

There is a whole infrastructure around ecommerce now which really allows smaller companies to get a foothold in the market without spending lots of money.

There have been lots of internet success stories but in terms of ecommerce it has been the big players that have stayed at the forefront such as Amazon. But this is starting to change and the tools are becoming available for everybody.

HelloFresh.co.uk is full of big, powerful imagery – why was this important for you?

One of the barriers to buying food online is that you don’t get the same multi-sensory experience of seeing it on the shelves. There are fewer senses to impress so you have to be more powerful in the way you do it.

2d imagery is important for us but video is  becoming more important – we are creating amazing video content which lets people see the product and see how they can enjoy it is they order it for their home.

Our core market is couples or families in the 30 – 55 age bracket who want to do more cooking at home. They aren’t necessarily as web savvy as Gen Y so it is important that the site is laid out well and easy to use.

I notice you have Live Chat also

Yes and its not the kind of thing that our company outsources. With Live Chat we answer people from in our office – it will always be one of our team. It helps to build a rapport and a relationship rather than just a transaction for a product.

We want to build a community, have people who send in pictures of themselves with our dishes and who join our video cook-alongs. We want better interaction than you would get in a supermarket.

Do you use social media?

So far social media has been fantastic for us and will only continue to develop. We recently did a live cook-along with Google. We had Patrick cooking one of the recipes in his kitchen and about five customers cooking at the same time and interacting with each other.

We realise that there are fairly low barriers to entry in the industry and so we need to stay at the forefront of technology in what online can allow us to do.

Find out more at www.hellofresh.co.uk